Today’s DAR is sort of about our cocktail party!
Category: Connections
I cannot avoid using the word “viral” here and I’m sorry.
Somyr Perry, whom we know from the following clause has fantastic taste in writing, discovered Ommatidia and made a meme out of it on her blogging community, Open Salon, which as far as I can tell is Livejournal for real journalists. Most of the posts are getting tagged or collected (except the ones that aren’t), and some of them are really excellent, that last in particular. You are awesome, Open Saloners! Now buy my book.
“I cannot fucking believe this is allowed.”
The unlooked-for side effect of my generation’s financial crisis has been, for me, that the world of finance is suddenly quite interesting, and worth learning about. There’s nothing like open-mouthed horror and blind panic to inspire autodidacticism. I still know very little about how finance really works, of course, but the punch line is that most financiers apparently didn’t either.
In that vein, I recommend one of the most darkly hilarious articles I’ve read in a while.
And topical as shit too
Okay, so the season break lasted a little longer than we meant it to. But we’re buffered up, geared down, spitshined and BACK!
Sequel to Stephen’s: a gentleman by the name of Gabriel had the clever idea of taking all the words in the Proserpina stories, minus her name, and doing up an eerily well-informed wordle.
Anyone? Anyone?
The other day I ripped off a 2007 Lyttle Lytton winner and wrote Rooney, a vision of the latter days of a movie which I always thought held sinister undertones. After I posted it, I realized that the premise really could probably stand further explanation, and I was not wrong! First Peter wrote Cameron Frye, and then William followed up with Rooney again:
Rooney is on the run.
It had started as a careful stroll by the river to dump the rifle: then a quiet ride home to find some people in ‘Save Ferris’ shirts quietly breaking into his house as he pulled up.
But Rooney was nothing if not prepared. Six months later and they’re still looking for the ‘Man who killed Chicago’. Meanwhile, Rooney’s shaved his moustache, pays in cash, and has a California Driver’s License that proclaims him to be
“Edward Rooney?”
He turns, halfway to his car, to find Sloane Peterson with a ‘Save Ferris’ lapel pin. And a gun.
Sometimes I really am tempted to turn on WordPress comments on Anacrusis, but come on, the LJ community is already so much fun!
Somebody Comes to Google
When I first heard that Cory Doctorow had published a book called Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, I thought, aha! I get that reference! It points to a list of archetypal story plots that I have seen on the Internet. How clever.
Now I actually need to find that list again and it appears to have been Googlebombed out of existence, thanks to the aforementioned Mr. Doctorow. Even with his surname eliminated from the search results, my google kwon do is failing me. Does anybody remember what I’m talking about?
“It’s actually Jacobean rather than Shakespearean.”
Ian and I are a bit obsessed with Brian Cox, and I was very happy to notice that the AV Club had done a Random Roles bit with him (an excellent interview schema, which takes the annoying bolded reporter-voice almost entirely out of it and just leaves the meat of the subject rambling about cool stuff). I was not disappointed. You might say I was reappointed. I mean, read this stunningly clear and concise evaluation of American film versus British theatre, prompted by a little question about his career arc post-Rob Roy:
“If you grow up in these islands—especially where I grew up in these islands—the theatre is very powerful, very potent. It’s a part of our heritage. Our culture is really a theatrical culture, not a cinematic culture. Feudal societies don’t create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don’t fall into ‘Everybody in their place and who’s who,’ and all that. But the theatre’s full of that. Especially in Shakespeare. So in a way, it behooves you as a British actor to try and master the classics and become a classical player. I got caught up in it. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, but I was too late.
“You see, the free cinema, the cinema of Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole, Alan Bates, Tom Courtenay… That all ended by the time I came along. So I went to work in the Royal Court, because they weren’t going to be making any more of those movies.”
Pretty convenient timing on that research, guys
Whoa, I guess they figured out the Antikythera Mechanism?